Wendong Zhang, associate professor made a recent presentation at the Great Lakes Crop Summit in Mt. Pleasant, MI, on Jan. 26, 2022, on "Midwest farmland values and U.S.-China agricultural trade: the way forward."
The agenda can be found at https://emshosting.blob.core.windows.net/media/GreatLakesCropSummit/Downloads/2022GridSchedule.pdf
Zhang, along with co-PIs Dermot Hayes, professor; Xi He, postdoc research associate; and Dr. Guiping Hu, associate professor of industrial engineering, ISU recently won a $649,980.00 NIFA grant for "Measuring and Forecasting China’s Agricultural Production, Stocks, and Imports with High Quality Data and Machine Learning Methods."
Zhang was interviewed for a Jan. 26 Agri-Pulse story, "Foreign interests keep buying US acreage with focus on Southwest."
Wendong Zhang, an associate professor of economics at Iowa State University, said more investors — both domestic and international — also chose to invest in farmland in 2020 because they saw it as both a hedge against inflation and as a relatively safe investment choice.
“Inflation concerns and low returns on alternative assets make people think about real estate, including farmland,” Zhang told Agri-Pulse. “At the same time, the pandemic in a sense also pushed people to think about rural acreage and land, not only for crop production, but also for natural amenities.”